Marian Hill hooks you in with new sultry visual, ‘was it not’ – Reignland
NYC duo Marian Hill takes you into their lush world with their new sultry dreamy single “Was It Not.” The new alt-RnB is downright beautiful from the cinematic instrumental in the beginning to the bass drop towards the middle of the track. The amazing blend of R&B and hip hop turned into a mysterious sultry genre that is just outstanding. The visual is a world all on its own that you don’t want to stop watching. The mind-blowing effects, lights, and everything in between in this video is genius. The vocals are so smooth and soothing as well. I could definitely hear a whole able with those vocals without skipping a track.
The EP (due out this March) explores themes that see the duo reflecting back on the past seven years of their career while looking forward to the future.
On the track producer/songwriter Jeremy Lloyd, explains, “‘ Was It Not’ is a song we’ve wanted to make for a long time. It pulls deeply from the jazz influences we started from – it sounds like a dark, smokey club and the vocal slices through that texture like butter. It’s about considering a relationship from long ago – remembering how we were so in love, and that person was everything to us, only now when we think about that one time…was that moment them? Or are we mixing it up with another fragment from our past? It’s about feeling a yearning for what once was, but only for a second because you remember why you left it in the past, and who you are now. It lives in a strange emotional in-between and we love it. A lot.”
Producer Jeremy Lloyd and vocalist Samantha Gongol released their debut EP, Play, in 2013. Two years later they followed it with Sway. The seven track project featured the smokey, trap-jazz hit “One Time,” which went viral on Vine and rewarded Lloyd and Gongol with a nice bump in popularity.
“One of the most amazing things about being discovered on the internet is you don’t have to tough it out at bars and shows, it kind of happens over night,” Gongol says. “But it also didn’t give me time to figure out my performance, to become confident.” Act One, their debut record, arrived in 2016 and brought the spotlight of virality onto the duo again. Apple featured the album’s single, “Down,” in an AirPods commercial nearly a year after Act One’s release, boosting the infectious single to #21 on the Billboard 100, and pushing Marian Hill through the mainstream bubble. “It happened so quickly we were constantly playing catch-up,” Gongol says. They rapidly shot a music video, played Fallon, and performed at Grammy parties.
Marian Hill showed how prolific they can be when they returned with their sophomore record only a year later titled Unusual (June 2018), 10 taut tracks including lead single “Subtle Thing” that garnered various tastemaker press approvals from the likes of PAPER Magazine, Billboard & Refinery 29. The record saw the duo solidify their position as a singular voice in modern pop and was paired with a series of ten one minute visual episodes invoking the work of filmmakers Roy Andersson and Peter Campus.
Get the track: Spotify: open.spotify.com/track/1MT3PR3 youtube.com/watch?v=haSRIKarqTA&feature=youtu.bedUyvoV5asR4Ow0u?si=GJqwCsmzT7OqFfdVyKAKzw
